With the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), the vast amount of information available across the different web sites on the Internet continues to grow as the number of networks and servers connected thereto continue to increase on a global scale. Accordingly, the availability of this information on the Internet enables users to obtain such information quickly. However, locating such information on the Internet can sometimes be difficult because of the vast numbers of websites available.
Currently, particular web sites on the WWW include search mechanisms termed “search engines” that have been developed in order to assist the users of the WWW in locating specific information therein. In particular, software programs, termed crawlers or spiders, automatically traverse, on a periodic basis, the WWW through the different web sites located thereon based on hyperlinks among the different web sites. When these software programs locate a web site whose information is not stored in the local database for this particular search engine, such programs transmit keywords and other relevant information concerning the new web site back to the web site executing these programs. Accordingly, this information about the new websites is stored into the local database for the search engine website.
Moreover, because of the dynamic nature of the WWW, these software programs also update such relevant information concerning a web site whose information is already stored in the search engine's local database. Accordingly, these search engine web sites store these search terms in a local database with other search terms from other websites. In operation, a user of these search engines enters a search query into the search engine and based on this local database, the search engine locates web pages on different web sites whose search terms include the search query and retrieves portions of these web pages. The search engine then displays these portions of the web pages to the user, thereby allowing the user to select from among the different web pages.
Additionally, another type of search engine for the WWW performs a search among the search engine results described above. In particular, these type of search engines perform a search among the individual search engines as described above and combines the results from these individual search engines into a combined results, thereby allowing the user to obtain results from across multiple search engines for a single search query.